UserCentriCities in collaboration with the city of Murcia convened virtually the first UserCentriCities peer-to-peer workshop. Bringing together Europe's most user-centric cities and regions, the workshop enabled participants to learn from each other and share best practices, especially on tools to design, develop, deliver and evaluate user-centric digital services
Ilkka Mäkitalo, CEO of Howspace, delivered a keynote presentation and shared his experience with creating a user-centric product.
Howspace is a platform tailored for collaborative work and co-creation processes. Its tenet relies on Mr Mäkitalo’s acute phrasing: ‘How to be heard in a way that matters?’ Howspace is a creative tool where users can interact around presentations, sticky-notes, live polls and surveys, pictures, videos. The process is as intuitive as possible: once you are invited to the platform, you are one click away to be in the middle of the process and ready to take part in the journey. During the pandemic, co-creation tools have largely been developed by many actors. Howspace added value is to enable the co-creation process by bringing the artificial intelligence (AI) part. There, AI is integrated to create real-time surveys, interactive activities, all of that in different languages.
During his presentation, Mr Mäkitalo pointed out many user-centricity principles that can be applied to the public sector. The first one is participation as a journey. The co-creation process is as important as the result. Mr Mäkitalo also made the parallel between the two audiences that play their part in such a digital tool: the facilitators who design the processes, and the users. It poses a two-pronged challenge: enabling the facilitators with tools to create the journey they want to set up and keeping it simple for the participants. Other principles that echo in the user-centricity world are: noiseless, contextual, facilitator led, workflow based. Mr Mäkitalo concluded with a message that summarises his philosophy: ‘If we know how to make it simple, we do it. Otherwise, we don’t!’
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